❅ is it ridiculous to buy a bikini when it's minus 21 degrees outside, in the middle of winter in a swedish ski-resort town..? never!
as a pleasant little surprise, duplicates of the jumpers my mum and dad gave me for my birthday arrived in the post, so i decided to exchange them for something else.... i got lost in the the wondrous website of victorias secret for hours and hours, days and days, dragged in to the land of bikinis and beach wear... oh how i miss summer and all things summerish! when i stumbled across the monokini, i realised i had to have it, regardless of the weather outside. illl wear it around the house if i have to!
a couple of years ago i bought a gorgeous rainforest-print monokini which i lost in costa rica and i was so devastated that i think i cried... i'm finally ready to move on. the black version is very hot! what do you think?
gorging my sorrows with chocolate brownies in the change room.
❆ yesterday was one of those low days that come around once every while... jerry woke me up at some ridiculous hour to ask where his ski jumpsuit was, without even looking first, and i couldn't get back to sleep. then we had an argument before work and although i tried to not let it effect my mood, it just felt like the universe was conspiring to make it as hard as possible for me. i spilt beer all over the first guests who arrived, then the coffee machine exploded on me, not once but twice and i had to spend half an hour cleaning up the mess each time. i was on the verge of tears when it then electrocuted me! it felt like a 'young ones' situation; like neil and the tea-pot, it was as if the coffee machine would rather commit suicide than be used by me! i struggled to hold it together all night.
luckily, today is a new day.
the sun is shining somewhere in that grey, snow-filled sky and i feel like the gods have finished with punishing me for whatever i've done. i woke up with a little more bounce in my stride and started the day by calling the lawyers to make a second payment towards the case that my brother and i are keeping very hush-hush about (re: a certain tv show.) he's david beckham's lawyer too so i think he might be good ;o) although it's still early days, i'm feeling very hopeful about it... rather than seeing it as unwanted drama and stress, i'm viewing it as ticking off another box in that big list of things to do in life: take someone to court: ☑ check.
❅ last night a group of estonian guys came in for dinner. they were all nice and friendly except one short, balding sleazebag, who every time i came to their table, made some slimy remark: that the steak was as delicious as i was, wondering if i was on the menu, if i'd like to share his ice cream, what time did i finish work etc. when they finally handed me the bill, i saw they'd left a large tip. i thanked them for coming and as i turned to walk away, i felt the idiot's finger sneakily reach out and poke me on the arse.
there was that split second where i had to decide if i was going to turn around and make a scene or just ignore it and keep walking. with a station full of demanding guests, i decided to let it go. as i emptied the tip into the tip jar, i felt both better and worse. $70.....so thats how much i charge for an arse poke...
♥ oh, how good cleaning feels for the soul!
to gather extra cash for my trip back home, ive taken on the job as the house cleaning lady and the boys pay me for it each week. with the andrews sisters playing through my ipod, i sing my little heart out as i mop, and feel like the proper 1950's housewife.
i'm so excited about going back home that it's all i think about. jerry's worried he'll miss me too much while i'm gone. i admitted to him that although i will miss him, it wont be as much as he'll miss me, since ill be having a holiday in the hot summer sunshine, too busy having fun to really pine for him... ;o) and its only 2 weeks anyway.
we've made our plans for after the ski season here in åre, and decided on london as our next home base. jerry found a really nice hotel management college there and i'm yet to decide what i'll do. jerry offered to pay for me to study something too but to be honest i really don't know what i want to do. i have no clear career ambitions and im actually quite envious that he's so sure of wanting to be a hotel manager. i wish i knew what i wanted to be....
✥ only three weeks til i go back home for my cousin donna's wedding.... im SO excited! its been nearly a year since i was home and i can't wait to see everyone again! the wedding is gonna be extra nice since its an outdoor wedding, in the bush in the middle of summer and my whole extended family will be there. im maid of honour and donna asked me to do a speech.... of course i was really happy that she asked me but now its crunch time and i have to start composing it. i want it to be really special and different, so ive been brainstorming ideas. her surname (also my mum's maiden name) is 'sidebottom' so in my research i decided to google the history of the somewhat humourous name. i remembered mum had once told me something about a skeleton in the closet and a dodgy name-change that became my mum's family name... and the blessed google didn't disappoint me....
how hilarious that i'm a descendant of a convict!! my english friends love to tease me about being from the colonies and having convict blood. and its actually true!! my ancestor, william langford from cheshire, england, was busted for thieving and was transported to the convict colonies of tasmania back in the 1800's. to avoid disgracing the family name, he lied that his name was sidebottom (his mother's maiden name). years later after he was released, he went into the liquor trade and made a fortune, which he then invested in land and numerous hotels around melbourne... he invited all of his brothers to migrate over and set them all up in the family business which flourished.
with a hint of pride, i recounted the story of my delinquent, boot-legging, business-minded ancestors to jerry and he enviously demanded how i found that information because he wants to look up his ancestors too!
❉ had such a nice night at the cabaret show that jerry took me to!! the costumes and choreography were fabulous and all the entertainers had such powerful voices. my hands are hurting from clapping so hard! and they completely surprised me by announcing my birthday in the middle of the show, bringing me a birthday cocktail and shoving a microphone and a video camera in my face with the whole audience watching. then everybody stood up and sang happy birthday to me!!! i was a bit embarrassed but loved it, of course!!! how many more days do you think i can stretch my birthday out into..? ;o)
✬ yay yay yay!! the thrill of receiving presents!!! ...my long awaited present from mum and dad finally arrived in the mail; a bunch of snuggly warm wooly jumpers from victoria's secret. i love them!! ♡ i did a little fashion parade photo-shoot in them and made jerry be the photographer, then got angry at him when the photos weren't as professional or creative as they would have been if i'd taken them ;o)
along with the jumpers came a beautiful calendar of 'erte' art, an amazing art-nouveau artist who's work i fell in love with in italy. on the cover, mum had written a very sweet birthday message which got me all emotional and home-sick.
from my little brother i got my own website: annarussell.com.au, which at the moment leads to this blog, but will eventually be a wonderland of magical and inspiring things, which haven't even been imagined yet ;o)....
♡ for my birthday celebration yesterday, we all went to the after-ski tavern 'fjällgården' up on the mountain, which was completely packed with hundreds of young skiers getting drunk after their day in the slopes. most of our gang had actually skied there but the few of us who don't like skiing, caught a taxi. there was a live band playing and jerry knew the guitar player so he asked him to sing happy birthday to me. after ten rounds of fishermans friend and jagermeister shots, all toasting my birthday, they called me up on stage to sing 'she's a jolly good fellow'. then i lead a samba chain dance all around the tavern, which nearly everybody in the place joined in on! it was SO much fun!!
since i hadn't skied there, there were two options for getting back down the mountain: walking or getting piggy-backed by someone who did ski.... i jumped on jerry's back, but he couldn't handle the bootylicious so i was passed on to 'worlds' (the worlds tallest guy) who skied all the way down the slope, in the dark, with me latched on like a monkey, giggling and wheeing the whole way down like i was on a ride at an amusement park. at the bottom of the mountain we stopped in at another after-ski bar for more shots and somehow i ended up on top of the bar, dancing by myself to a cheering crowd. 'you're such an attention seeker' jesper told me afterwards, to which i shrugged.. 'its my birthday'. our drunken gang then did a rampage of the various bars in town, rolling in screaming, wrestling, singing and wreaking havoc, til we eventually ended up at beefalo. leaving all the boys fighting and swearing at each other at the bar, i ran to the food counter, jumped up and sat on it and started shouting through to the kitchen for pancakes and ice cream. daffy took me aside: 'i know its your birthday, but you still have to behave yourself while you're at work'... oopsy daisy! we went home and had a wrestling tournament then demolished six pizzas. i wondrously woke up without a hangover. who says i'm old?!!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!
today was my 29th birthday! ...only one year left of my twenties!!
when i finally jumped on facebook tonight after work, i was greeted with 56 happy birthday messages! with a huge smile on my face and a warm fuzzy feeling in my heart, i read through and appreciated every single one of them!
i had a lovely birthday! jerry sang a morning happy birthday to me with a candle and a chocolate and coconut sweet, up until very recently called a 'nigger ball' in swedish. he'd already given me a new camera as an early birthday present last week, which i love ♡
we had a romantic brunch at a nice cafe in town and i told jerry the story of my birth, 29 long years ago, which my mum used to tell me and which ill also share with you readers....
i was born on a warm mid-summers afternoon in a cottage on the top of a hill on the north coast of tasmania. my parents had their friends around to watch the home-birth and since my mum had been told by a sooth-sayer that she was having another boy, she was overjoyed to instead have me... my placenta was saved and planted with a small peach-tree seedling which is now a big, fruit-bearing tree in my nanna's front yard. my cousins used to refuse to eat the peaches off it out of disgust.
i had no hair until i was three years old, and a slightly asian look to my face so that i resembled 'tripitaka' from the classic tv show 'monkey magic' and from when i was a small baby i always held my head high, with an air of snobbery about me, as if i was some kind of royalty.
"thank god you're not like that any more" was all jerry had to say about the whole story.
i always thought tripitaka was female (mainly because of that story) and was startled to discover otherwise many years later!
we went bowling with the boys after brunch and i lost, which isn't supposed to happen on your birthday, then i went to work (which also isn't supposed to happen on your birthday ;o) ...tomorrow we all have the day off so the birthday celebrations will commence up in the after-ski restaurant in the slopes and then jerry has promised to take me to the local cabaret show on tuesday... i love stretching my birth day into a birth week!! :o)
❄ today was the quietest day ever at work! with only six tables to serve the entire day, jesper and i were so bored that we occupied ourselves with a new competition; 'who's the best at the most things'....
jesper beat me with the orange-peel spiral-making, mainly because i tried too hard and made the spiral too long.
at his attempt at a california roll (squashed out of shape with loose fillings in the middle) i was in tears of laughter and the guests were even looking over to see what was so amusing. i felt that my sushi was much nicer than his, however when i brought it back into the kitchen to eat, chris, the polish dish-washer stared at it with a mocking look and asked me if it was my idea. "im sorry, but this is not good. for you it is a long path to sushi chef".. jesper-2: anna-0. damn it!
the third competition was cafe-latte hearts. jesper screwed his up straight away by over-pouring the milk. although he still claimed his looked more appealing, i left the judging to marcus the chef. marcus agreed jesper's looked more appealing but i reinstated the fact that he was judging the heart and not the appeal and so mine won. ...still, it was barely a 2:1 outcome.
it seems i'm not as naturally talented at as many things as i thought i was....in fact, when asked if i could come up with one single thing that i was really better at than jesper, i had to think hard. and yoga was all i could think of on the spot.
when i came home and told jerry, he instantly (and angrily) came up with a long list of my many skills and talents. it's so nice having my biggest admirer so close at hand :o)
❆ this week has been really quiet in åre and we were worried about having an empty bar for our second coyote ugly show last night. the girls and i had choreographed our own bar-top dance routine to 'i love rock and roll' which wouldn't have been the same without a good audience, and i was getting very nervous.
we finished serving all the dinners to the dining guests and as i was politely suggesting deserts and coffees to one table of english guys, they took me off guard by asking me if i was dancing tonight. before i could answer, they said 'you better be, because that's the only reason we came'.... aaah!!
as the diners left the restaurant, hoards of young people began streaming in to fill the bar. we got into our costumes and i peeked down at the end of the bar. sitting at the bar corner, directly where my dancing position was, were my two housemates, jesper and cavalli. i quickly grabbed the girls for a last minute position swap. there was no way i was going to grind and slide in those short-shorts over their faces!
the crowd was a little rougher than last week. pia had a coin thrown so hard at her head that it was bleeding. one respectable local hotel manager was groping so many girls arses in the audience that the security guard asked him to leave. he was so drunk that he lay down on the floor of the bar and said 'make me!', so he was dragged out through the crowd by his legs! girls and guys in the audience jumped up on tables to dance along with us and we got so into the dances that we were dripping with sweat! i wished we could've used the post-mix guns to squirt the crowd and ourselves but we weren't allowed to.
the girls went home today but they might be back later on in the season. anyway it was fun while it lasted..
❖ jerry has started a new craze in the house amongst those of us with iphones: the completely addictive iphone scrabble-type game called 'words'. we're so fiercely competitive with it that any time of day you can hear one of us whooping from our separate rooms after scoring big points on words against each other. i have a distinct advantage with english as my first language and i love running past cavalli's room directly after kicking his arse with a big word to find him sitting on the side of his bed, hunched over his iphone with a forlorn face. our other two housemates, jesper and daffy, have both tried (unsuccessfully) to ban the game, out of jealousy at not having iphones ;o)
after sunday night partying with the beefalo crew, otherwise known as 'la famiglia', yesterday we decided to go on a short road trip to östersund, the nearest town with a cinema, to watch the much talked about 'avatar'....
WOW!! really really amazing! we all left the cinema wishing we could've stayed in the wonderful land of 'pandora' forever... especially jerry who always gets so emotional in movies and i have to pretend i haven't caught him secretly crying in the dark...
❆ hooray hooray for angelica the cleaning lady! i love our little share-house and its characters within. we all get up each day and spend the morning taking the piss out of each other over breakfast. everybody shouts melodious greetings at cavalli in italian even though no-one else speaks it, including cavalli; we shotgun fight over who has to make the coffee, jesper takes the piss out of jerry's swenglish, then my ocker slang, everyone tries to force me to eat caviar paste, we all have a laugh at the fact that cavalli starts work so early that all he ever does is sleep and work, jesper then somehow antagonizes jerry so much that he drops his bathrobe and ends up karate fighting naked in the kitchen, all the while daffy sits back with a bemused look, as if this is all normal morning behaviour in his apartment.
i must have become less anal and definitely less tidy since my old share-housing days. none of us clean anymore and the apartment has gotten into such a state of unsanitary foulness that jerry begged our lovely colleague angelica to come and clean our house once a week. five hours of scrubbing and now its sparkling!
❉ last night was 'coyote ugly' night at beefalo. two coyote girls that come every year to do the show, arrived at work in the evening to set up the bar and do promotions. my boss asked me if i would like to join them and be the third coyote... would i like to? i never say no. while the crowd gathered in the bar, we dressed up in our outfits backstage in the changerooms. and although my costume covered much more skin than i've shown in public in the past, all this time of wearing winter layers had made me shy and prude and all of a sudden i felt completely and obscenely naked. as i walked out into the bar i saw the eyes pop in the heads of my colleagues.
for the first few hours i refused to get up on stage to dance with the girls and just served drinks with attitude instead. but when midnight struck and the girls got up for their fourth bar-top dance, their pockets full of tips, the entire crowd began thumping on the bar and chanting 'anna anna anna anna'. i realised i had to get up there ;o) it was such a fun night that i agreed to do it again next wednesday! yeeehaw!
♡ today i spent the day with the lovely ingrid kling, a friend from stockholm who's visiting (and hopefully, possibly staying in åre!) while partying together on saturday night at 'wersens', we stole the show with our pole dancing tricks on the random pole they have on the dance-floor. both of us were so good at it that we shocked ourselves! we decided that we'd love to join the big hollywood craze and take pole-dancing classes... if only it were available in åre...
then today we hit the slopes. ingrid the ski-pro, taught me an invaluable ski-tip called 'pizza, french fries' which helped me so much in my turns that i was gliding down 'the bear' slope, barely falling at all! (later when we were separated i forgot about the pizza, fell badly and am now expecting one whole arse-cheek to turn blue...)
i don't think ill ever become a ski junkie... or even any better than barely competent... its just not in me, the way pole-dancing seems to be ;o)
✶ HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
jerry and i saw in the new year together, skipping out from behind the bar at 'nova' to watch the fireworks outside in the snow-covered town square of åre.
looking back, 2009 was quite an action-packed year for me! although i had my fair share of disasters and predicaments, i also had a lot of adventures and excitement! i managed to chase the summer around the world, from australia to stockholm, croatia, spain, morocco and then only when all traces of sunshine were gone from the northern hemisphere, i admitted defeat and jumped into the depths of winter in snowy åre.
2009 began for me with my best friends back home in oz, then i had my sweetheart travel the seas to be with me, went on a lovely beach holiday with my family, visited byron bay, was maid of honour in a wedding, then i crossed the planet to be with my sweetheart, i started six new jobs, made many new and wonderful friends, had my first swedish 'midsummer' party, got a new pair of boobs, had my tv show 'no way san jose' bought and screened on ABC, learnt to ski and discovered a new hobby which has brought me great pleasure and that is... writing this blog!
the yellow brick road seems to have stretched out further into the distance and left me to remain dorothy a while longer, searching for my ruby red slippers. i'll eventually reach oz, but 'happiness is the journey, not the destination', as someone wise once said...
i want to say thank you to my supportive family who are definitely the best in the world, my friends who are my precious gems and my amazing boyfriend jerry who makes me feel beautiful and special.
and last but not least, i want to thank my readers! i hope you'll follow me down the yellow brick road through 2010 and beyond! ....
